Things are collapsing in the final volume of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that seems, now more than ever, as a charged and tilted version of our own. Establishments are crumbling, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Authority is flowing away from states, and gathering in the halls of theocrats, the vaults of conglomerates, the hands of crowds. "Some force is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says trader a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the ancient paths from his seat in an Aleppo cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and solid are deteriorating and giving way."
Core Enigma and Her Quest
Just what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the mystery that propels the concluding book, which picks up where The Secret Commonwealth concluded. This is, reportedly, the author's last venture into the carefully crafted, deeply captivating world he first introduced 30 years ago, with the release of the first trilogy. It's a realm whose terrain aligns with that of our world, but whose chronicles veers and changes with ours; where the individuals appear and think and act like us, but are paired by daemons, beings in animal form; where the air are populated with witches and legendary creatures, but underneath, vehicles are ridden and drinks is consumed, and mature professors carry fancy shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a 12-year-old in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then saw again as a infant in the first volume, the introductory book with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the spiky and persistent protagonist of the earlier books, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, less sure. This circumscription is heightened by her separation from her soul companion, Pantalaimon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the cause which caused him to abandon her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
Pan's decision to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an aspect which he represents as her "vision"), and her quest to rejoin with him, were the incitements of the prior book, which saw the protagonist undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with marvel and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in motion, and sinister powers at work. The church authority – the faith's governing authority, and Pullman's brilliantly sinister embodiment of strict, administrative malice – is under recent guidance, and asserting its power. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who holds responsible her for his family member's death – has positioned himself into the office of head of the church's governing body, and is set on using his fresh authority to expand the religion's dominium. Another protagonist, who rescued young the heroine to safety along a swollen Thames as an child in the prequel, is now an academic with a additional duty in intelligence work: he is dispatched to a key location to find out more about the antagonist's plans. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the scarce and valuable essential oil which manifests mysteriously to be the cause of a societal and financial crisis spreading out from that area. The substance is viewed by some as a commercial good, by alternate groups as a scientific or esoteric wonder, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a source of darkness; an affront that must be obliterated. The question of where it comes from, what it stands for, and if it should be removed or protected is escalating in importance.
As in the first series, the heroine's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran largely in tandem. In The Rose Field, they come together. Like His Dark Materials, the protagonist's choices and her destiny are revealed to be inseparably woven with the fate of the universe. Her personal quest to rejoin with her soul and recover her imagination becomes the key conflict in a wider battle with an controlling system which, as these systems typically do, is striving to stifle freedom of reason, innovation and culture: all the inner, resistant ways in which individuals can be free.
Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles
The book starts with the unveiling of a series of curious fissures in the fabric of the Earth's air: gateways that seem to lead to different dimensions. A particular window seems to be the source of the much debated botanical substance. The Magisterium, with its leader at its head, classifies these openings as a threat to the institution's beliefs and aims to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from rigid rationalism and back to feeling, nevertheless, her certainty that these places must be protected – that what they stand for and what they offer is somehow essential – increases. "Dust, or the substance, or the imagination, or the field of roses, or no matter what we label it," she says, "we require it." The stage for a Blakean conflict between purity and experience is established.
Story Tempo and Character Development
At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the